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Tumblr brings in editorial team to run staff blog

Tumblr, the blogging platform valued at $500m, has hired an editorial team to cover the goings-on within the company.

Putting a not-exactly-new but certainly notable slant on the ‘company blog’, the team will document changes in Tumblr's services in an updated blog that will be accessible to the company’s 42m users.

Chris Mohney, SVP for content at lifestyle and culture blog BlackBook Media, will be the site’s editor in chief while Jessica Bennett, a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will be executive editor.

Mohney told the New York Times (NYT) that: “Fun, cool, compelling and organic creation will go a lot further towards demonstrating the potential of this nascent creative population than simplistic or forced attempts at corporate boosterism".

We imagine that he means leading by example and creating great content from within is far more valuable in showing off Tumblr's potential than hiring an agency to do.

Kaspersky Labs was one of the first to invest in branded journalism, hiring some of the security industry’s most credible writers to launch threatpost in 2009, which promises to be the ‘first stop for security news’.

As NYT points out, Facebook recently hired Daniel Fletcher, a 2009 graduate of Northwestern University’s journalism school, to be its managing editor and create new content for Facebook’s channels and pages. The idea that every company is a media company or a publisher is certainly becoming a reality.

Behind-the-scenes content, direct from a brand, is becoming expected – and bringing in trained journalists to create this is theoretically a short cut to getting your content strategy right.

Whether that's the case or not, this is certainly something we'll be seeing more of in the coming year.

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